When you say "x my $oResult" it means to create a NEW variable, local to just that one debugging command, and display its value, which is of course undefined. If you just say "x $oResult" it will display the correct value.

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Incidentally, I just ran your program under perl 5.8.8 on a Linux box, installing WWW::Search::AltaVista (and Yahoo as well) from CPAN. It works fine for me. You might have run into a Windows (or ActivePerl) compatibility issue. Sometimes it helps to use the version of Perl that runs under Cygwin .